How Exotic Woods, Inc. Saved $100,000 in Inventory

Headquartered in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, Exotic Woods Inc. needed help managing their 30,000-square-foot warehouse. This led to impossible-to-follow paper trails, $100,000 spent on dead inventory, cumbersome, time-consuming daily accounts payable uploads, poor tracking of customer and order history, and over 40 hours a week spent on purchasing.

That’s a lot of wood to keep track of, which is a major reason why Exotic Woods switched to ECI’s Spruce platform. By doing so, they were able to enhance a number of key performance metrics to make their company more efficient and profitable, such as:

• Strengthen customer and order history tracking
• Single data entry to create and link all documents from PO through invoice 
• 10 hours of weekly payroll savings 
• $2K in paper-cost savings annually 
• Smarter purchasing for reduced dead inventory—a $40,000 savings in a single instance 

Mike DeBoer, Exotic Woods general manager, knew they needed to find the right software system to increase efficiency. “We had been using a customized system built by an independent programmer,” he says. “After about a year, we realized we weren’t getting to where we needed to be. The inventory management portion wasn’t there. We were spending $100,000 on dead inventory and 40 hours a week on purchasing. Customers’ orders were backed up; every day was a headache. It just wasn’t working out. Customized programs can be great, but they can take a long time to build and have too many hurdles. Our company was growing too fast for it to keep up.” 

Learn HOW Spruce made all this possible for Exotic Woods and can do the same for you through our latest Spruce customer story.